Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

The General Theory of Walkability explains how, to be favored, a walk has to satisfy four main conditions: it must be useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting.

Since it is the only real constraint to driving, congestion is the one place where people are made to feel the pinch in their automotive lives. Were it not for congestion, we would drive enough additional miles to make congestion. So the traffic study has become the default act of planning, and more than a few large companies can thank traffic stud

Cities whose economic-development strategy is a corporate-capture strategy are typically those whose economic development director and planning director don’t talk to each other. The smart cities, like Lowell, hire a director of planning and development, who is first charged with creating a city where people want to be. Rather than trying to land n

This all adds up to a situation in which you are paying to drive whether you drive or not, in which the more you drive, the less each mile costs, and in which the greatest constraint to driving, then, is congestion. While the cost of the trip will rarely keep us home, the threat of being stuck in traffic often will, at least in our larger cities. C

For people to choose to walk, the walk must serve some purpose. In planning terms, that goal is achieved through mixed use or, more accurately, placing the proper balance of activities within walking distance of each other. While there are exceptions, most downtowns have an imbalance of uses that can be overcome only by increasing the housing suppl

In Miami, for example, people wonder why intersections in residential neighborhoods are often so fat: two relatively narrow streets will meet in a sweeping expanse of asphalt that seems to take hours to walk across. The answer is that the firefighters’ union once struck a deal that no truck would ever be dispatched without a hefty number of firemen

Some version of this condition exists in most American cities. In downtown Chicago, curbside parking costs one-thirteenth as much as off-street parking.40 The outcome of this market inefficiency is not just congestion and all its attendant woes—pollution, time wasted, slow emergency response—but also reduced revenue to area businesses. This counter

2009 article in Newsweek, hardly an esoteric publication: “Demand from drivers tends to quickly overwhelm the new supply; today engineers acknowledge that building new roads usually makes traffic worse.”

The first step to understanding how parking works is to get a grasp of how much it costs and who pays for it. Because it is so plentiful and often free to use, it is easy to imagine that it costs very little. But this is not the case. The cheapest urban parking space in America, an 8½-by-18-foot piece of asphalt on relatively worthless land, costs